Monday, June 24, 2013

last Week we started a new sermon series on the Sermon on the Mount. We introduced the introduction this week with the Beatitudes. Here are four slides: The Beatitudes Paraphrase, the world's Beatitudes and The Believer's Beatitudes

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Marytn Lloyd-Jones"To those who are prone to spiritual depression through timorous fear of the future, I say in the Name of God and in the words of the Apostle: 'Stir up the gift,' talk to yourself, remind yourself of what is true of you. Instead of allowing the future and thoughts of it to grip you, talk to yourself, remind yourself of who you are and what you are, and of what Spirit is within you; and, having reminded yourself of the character of the Spirit, you will be able to go steadily forward, fearing nothing, living in the present, ready for the future, with one desire only, to glorify Him who gave His all for you."

Friday, January 25, 2013

I have been reading Os Guinness' new book 'A Free People's Suicide and it is excellent. Here are three quotes about our Constitution and our need for Virtue and Faith from pages 98-99

"The framers also held that, though the Constitution’s barriers against
the abuse of power are indispensable, they were only ‘parchment barriers” and
therefore could never be more than part of the answer.And in some ways they were the secondary part
at that.The U.S. Constitution was never
meant to be the sole bulwark of freedom, let alone a self-perpetuating machine
that would go by itself.The American
founders were not, in Joseph de Maistre’s words, ‘poor men who imagine that
nations can be constrained with ink.’ Without strong ethics to support them,
the best laws and the strongest institutions would only be ropes of sand.”

“liberty lives in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there. No constitution,
no law, no court can even do much to save it.While it lives there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save
it.”

“What the founders believed should compliment and reinforce the
Constitution and its separation of powers is the distinctive moral ecology that
is at the heart of ordered liberty.Tocqueville called it ‘the habits of the heart,’ …the cultivation and
transmission of the conviction that freedom requires virtue, which requires
faith, which requires freedom, which in turn requires virtue, which requires
faith, which requires freedom and so on like the recycling triangle, ad
infinitum. “